Situated right on the wharf, the museum is housed in an old fish processing plant, now a fishermen's museum, restaurant and the Ice House Bar. Upstairs, the museum has displays of many of the tools of the trade, from a Nova Scotian Dory and a model of a schooner to the tools and artefacts once used in the factory to process the fish brought in by the fishermen for processing. As well, there are historic photos of the local fleet and the fishermen who manned it.
An interesting display is a 3D model of the "Grand Banks", the area which, for a few centuries, supplied the bounty of seafood which was the lifeblood of the Maritimes. It has been fished by fleets from maritime Canada and New England, as well as fishing fleets from Europe for over five centuries.
Text from the plaque at the relief map is reproduced below. The map is directly in from the upstairs entrance to the museum.
As museums go, this museum is special, having been listed in the book "1000 Places to see in the US and Canada Before You Die". Below is a short description of the museum, from
Their Website. The museum should definitely be on everyone's to do list when in Lunenburg.
The Banks
The offshore banks have been the source of one of Canada's greatest renewable natural resources: the fish stocks of the northwest Atlantic Ocean. This resource has been exploited for more than five hundred years, making the bank fishery one of Canada's oldest industries. The banks are a series of elevated plateaus on the coastal shelf of eastern North America. This shelf formed an extensive coastal plain before being submerged when the last glacier melted some 10,000 years ago, raising the sea level 150 metres.
Vertical exaggeration in the model is 20 times.
Ocean Currents
The banks are the meeting ground of several important ocean currents, including:
1. The Labrador Current - a cold, deep current which gathers nutrients on its southward flow.
2. The St. Lawrence Current - also rich in nutrients from the run-off of the continent.
3. The Gulf Stream - a warm, comparatively sterile surface current.
These currents meet and mix in the shallow waters over the banks, providing nutrients needed to support vast numbers of fish.